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  • Thatsthejoke.jpeg.zip

  • In many cases it should be fine to point them all at the same server. You'll just need to make sure there aren't any collisions between schema/table names.

  • I'm not saying there aren't downsides, just that it isn't a totally crazy strategy.

  • Same. I write FOSS software in my free time and also paid.

  • Man, I really think you should either saddle up, don't block ads, or use a free, non-ad-supported alternative.

    Sync is made by a single dev who uses it as his main source of income. It's not made by a corporation. Taking the fruits of someone's labor, that they have priced to make it worth their time, feels kinda shitty to me.

    If you really feel it's so much better than the alternatives that you won't even use them, then pay what the person making it feels they need to keep making it.

  • You're being sarcastic but even small fees immediately weed out a ton of cruft.

  • I don't know. This would dovetail well with a bunch of studies that have found verbal and physical abuse of retail workers at an all time high since the pandemic. Similar studies have found the same thing for road rage.

    There has always been some fraction of poorly behaved people, but that fraction seems to have become larger since the pandemic, whatever the actual mechanism that caused it is.

  • I work in the film industry and can say, with certainty, that TNG was not shot with the same consideration.

    Television back then knew it was being mastered for SDTV and the artists had a good idea of what it meant they could get away with compared to something that would be screened in 35mm. Final screening medium has always been the most important consideration, not capture medium.

    Audiences have also gotten less forgiving of visual quality and less willing to suspend disbelief as the bar for quality has steadily risen. It means that shows are both working on higher definition target mediums and under more scrutiny than ever.

    Like, I love TNG but go watch and tell me that it looks half as good as SNW.

  • While that's true, we have to allow for the fact that our own intelligence, at some point, is an encoded model of the world around us. Probably not through something as rigid as precise statistics, but our consciousness is somehow an emergent phenomenon of the chemical reactions in our brains that on their own have no real understanding of the world either.

    I do have to wonder if at some point, consciousness will spontaneously emerge as we make these models bigger and more complex and -- maybe more importantly -- start layering specialized models on top of each other that handle specific tasks then hand the result back to another model, creating feedback loops. I'm imagining a nueral network that is trained on something extremely abstract like figuring out, from the raw input data, what specialist model would be best suited to process that data, then based on the result, what model would be best suited to refine that data. Something we train to basically be an executive function with a bunch of sub models available to it.

    Could something like that become conscious without realizing it's "communicating" with us? The program executing the LLM might reflexively process data without any concept that it's text, but still be emergently complex enough when reflecting its own processes to the point of self awareness. It wouldn't realize the data represents a link to other conscious beings.

    As a metaphor, you could teach a very smart dog how to respond to certain, basic arithmetic problems. They would get stuff wrong the moment you prompted them to do something out of their training, and they wouldn't understand they were doing math even when they got it "right", but they would still be sentient, if not sapient, despite that.

    It's the opposite side of the philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie behaves exactly as a human would, but is a surface-level automaton with no inner life.

    But I propose that we also consider the inverse-philosophical zombie, an entity that behaves like an automation, but has an inner life that has not recognized its input data for evidence of an external world outside it's own bounds. Something that might not even recognize it's executing a program the same way we aren't consciously aware of the chemical reactions our brain is executing to make us think.

    I don't believe current LLMs are anywhere near complex enough to give rise to that sort of thing, but they are also still pretty early in their development and haven't started to be heavily layered and interconnected the way I think they'll end up.

    At the very least it makes for a fun Sci-fi premise.

  • We really need to start redistributing how we spend money on health care. Public option, lower executive pay. More non-emergency long term facilities for patients with psych issues or rehabilitation, and chronic illness care. Better pay and shorter shifts for doctors and nurses. Subsidies for medical tech companies to offset end-user price. More government-funded research into medical tech.

    Health care should realistically be our biggest industry akin to a military with the social status of being a soldier and the compensation of being a software developer. We have the wealth and technology to help most people live healthy lives. We need the government to incentivize allocating it correctly.

  • Things that amount to "trans people shouldn't exist" or "trans people shouldn't get medical care" are more than just "mean".

  • Yeah. Part of me has to wonder what -- if any -- backchanneled agreements there are between Glynn Shotwell and the DoD for if/when Musk does something truly compromising.

  • Lol, Texas and Florida are doing a good enough job of knocking themselves down without help from me.

  • Except in a true free market zoning laws wouldn't keep adorable, high density housing from being constructed to artificially boost housing prices.

    Other than that I agree with you.

  • IMO if the admins have obviously abandoned an instance it's worth de-federating regardless of activity level or political lean. It's a ticking time bomb for malicious links, spam, political trolling, and other bullshit.

  • Looking past the technobabble...

    The implications of quantum mechanics just reframes what it means to not have free will.

    In classical physics, given the exact same setup you make the exact same choice every time.

    In Quantum mechanics, given the same exact setup, you make the same choice some percentage of the time.

    One is you being an automaton while the other is you being a flipped coin. Neither of those really feel like free will.

    Except.

    We are looking at this through a kind of implied metaphor that the brain is some mechanism, separate from "us" that we are forced to think "through'. That the mechanisms of the brain are somehow distorting or restricting what the underlying self can do.

    But there is no deeper "self". We are the brain. We are the chemical cascade bouncing around through the neurons. We are the kinetic billiard balls of classical physics and the probability curves of quantum mechanics. It doesn't matter if the universe is deterministic and we would always have the same response to the same input or if it's statistical and we just have a baked "likelihood" of that response.

    The way we respond or the biases that inform that likelihood is still us making a choice, because we are that underlying mechanism. Whether it's deterministic or not it's just an implementation detail of free will, not a counterargument.

  • And often if you box yourself into an API before you start implementing, it comes out worse.

    I always learn a lot about the problem space once I start coding, and use that knowledge to refine the API of my system as I work.

  • Its original mandate was investigating financial fraud. Presidential protection came later and has always been in addition to their original mandate.

  • Even though things seem shitty now. I think that, on average, humanity's story is one of self-improvement. This Good Place quote comes to mind:

    What matters isn't if people are good or bad. What matters is if they are trying to be better today than they were yesterday.

    I think humanity is trying to be better today than it was yesterday. Human history is a story of more and more types of people being given more and more rights. Of slowly putting down our rocks and spears and guns and trying to live together. Of learning to care for nature while holding the power to destroy it. We've had backslides, but overall we've come a long way from the Apes we once were.

    I think humanity deserves the chance to keep trying to better itself. I hope we get to the point where we are good enough to give ourselves that chance. As another scene from Good Place put it:

    Come on dummy, faster.